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What I believe |
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Mystical Experience or Frivolous Equation?
This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666. (Rev 13:18) In Spring 1986, my life changed. I didn’t know then that it had changed. But it had. I received what I regarded at that difficult moment a strange experience that could only have come from God. I discovered an equation that could change the course of human history, or that could languish in the dungeons of history as a meaningless coincidence that changes nothing. I had discovered that Ian Paisley’s name was equal to that of Gerry Adams on a particular numeric alphabet. Their names came out at 666, the number of the beast according to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible (see Appendix 1). In Spring 1986, I was a son of a Derry SDLP councillor, who had been mayor of the city three years earlier. I was involved with the SDLP as a party election worker, helping out both my father and John Hume around election time. I was a young man with a future, so I hoped. I was spiritual in the sense that I felt a close bond to God, and I frequently involved myself in an intense communication with Him, particularly at mass. So far as I was concerned, good was on the side of the SDLP in the arduous battle with Sinn Fein that defined that period, a period when Sinn Fein had just entered the electoral process. The acts of violence against members of the SDLP, including elected politicians, provided me with enough ammunition to dislike what the republicans represented for the rest of my life. I was young enough to be attracted by the acts of war of the IRA against the British establishment, and against injustice, but I was not a supporter of the use of violence. I could never be convinced that it was just to compromise justice and expect that right remained on your side. I admired what the hunger strikers of 1981 had done for republicans but I was never convinced that it was the proper course of action. I felt that they had allowed themselves to be used. I was a young man with normal traits and habits. I liked the company of women but never seemed to get enough of it. I liked sport, particularly Gaelic football, and I was in a couple of teams at that time. As a Gaelic footballer, I represented my faculty, the Commerce faculty, and my college, University College Galway, now the National University of Ireland, Galway. I was good at my position in football, but not brilliant. I was academically bright, but not exceptional. I was studying for a B.Comm degree that I was to pass with honours in June 1987. I enjoyed life to the full within the confines of a student existence that entailed frugality and sacrifice. I had a sense that I was being called to Galway when I first went there in September 1984. It was a strange, eerie feeling that God was calling me in a kind of vocation that was going to be very special. But I didn’t know what it really meant. I assumed deep down that one day I would be the successor to John Hume as a political leader in Derry, and that I had that kind of calling. But that was a long way off, and I had to perform well in my exams, and things had to work out well in life before I made a decision to go into politics. Nevertheless, John Hume was my role model and I looked up to him as a man who could change the world in a positive way. The strange feeling of being called went away after the first few weeks at UCG. I was just a student, with an agenda for three years to learn as much about my course and about life as I could. It was therefore a great surprise to have the strange experience that entailed me working out the number of a politician’s name at 666. I wasn’t shocked since in my subconscious I had been expecting something of an unusual nature. There was just something charming about Galway. It was like a dream. Every time I went there, whether on holiday with my parents as a child, or as a teenager with my friends, or as a student then, I was always so blissfully happy. During my strange experience, I felt a great sense of being loved. It was an intense experience, one that could really only have involved the Holy Spirit. At that moment, I decided that it meant a great deal and that I had been searching for something that I was about to discover. I decided that it related to a numeric alphabet a friend had told me about back in my days at St Columb’s College in Derry. On this numeric alphabet, Ian Paisley’s name worked out at 666. At the intense moment in Galway, in the family home where our flat was situated, I discovered that Gerry Adams’ name worked out at 666 too. This was immediately significant from a statistical probability point of view. But, more than that, it was a significant discovery in the sense that these leaders were regarded as being on the extremes of the politics that I lived under in Northern Ireland. I told a few people about my discovery at that time, a time when the IRA campaign was raging furiously in the North. I didn’t expect that it would change anything. But I told Mark Durkan, now leader of the SDLP, and a few Sinn Fein members who I had gotten to know at UCG. It was meaningless to me now in a conscious sense. But under the surface, I hadn’t dealt with it properly. I hadn’t asked why it had happened to me. I hadn’t queried what it really meant, since in my subconscious I realised that it was a significant discovery. A war was raging in my mind between my denial that I had a vocation to do God’s work and my desire to remain true to what I believed was right. It was a war that was to take its toll on me. Four years later, as a trainee accountant in Belfast, I became ill with what was eventually diagnosed as manic-depression. It was a strange, eerie introduction to my illness. I felt that God was revealing Himself to me because I was His son. It was easily the most exhilarating experience that I have ever had in my life, and yet I was supposed to be ill. In the midst of an intense sequence of coincidences, Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich died at the age of 66 years and 6 months exactly, giving the coincidence of three sixes. I had forgotten about my experience in Galway by then. But now I was destined never to forget it. I had to embrace it and understand what it meant. I had to understand and accept that God was calling me and that he wanted me to dedicate my life to the understanding of an equation that may change the world forever. Over the course of many weeks, months and years, I have struggled through a life afflicted with the mood changes associated with manic-depression, and arrived at what I understand to the most detailed understanding of the meaning of the equation. I have been helped along this road by God and His angels. I have no doubt about that. I have been affected by the pain of being apart from most of the human race due to my illness, and I have consequently struggled all the more to find a meaning that draws me nearer to the centre of the human family. In my mind the equation is divinely ordained. It comes from God and it encapsulates the story of humanity from its origins in the Old Testament to its liberation through the New Testament. It is a profound equation to the profound and shallow to those who bear that description. The meaning of the thirty years of conflict that afflicted Northern Ireland and beyond is set down in Biblical terms as a fight for the hearts and minds of those who live in that corner of Ireland. It was and is a conflict not between the left and right as is the norm in Europe, but between the Old Testament and New Testament value systems. More than that, it sets the context for the future of the entire human race and the fight for social justice that is ongoing. Essentially it sets a context for the story of the Social Democratic and Labour Party from its inception in 1970, through its great moments to its momentary fall from favour in the eyes of the Northern Ireland electorate at the 2001 General and Local Government Elections. This party has been central to the formation of a political version of Christianity in the midst of an era of violence that saw it draw upon the teachings of Christ to stymie support for Sinn Fein in the Catholic community. The Troubles, as they are quaintly known, were the greatest challenge to any party’s faith in the ways of the world. They were a time of vicious acts of terror and destruction, where human life was cheapened and suffering untold. The SDLP came through that as a party of hope, creating an opportunity for peace, not for the first time, in helping Sinn Fein to lead their supporters away from violence. The SDLP was the party that I grew up with due to my father’s involvement. I supported it all my life. It is said that one’s religion is an accident of birth. However, it is no accident of birth as to which political party you support. It is a matter of choice, and the choice is between acting either in good faith or in bad faith. Nowhere has that been more true than here in the North during the last thirty years. There has been a clear choice between love and hate, between good and evil, and between the New Testament and the Old Testament. I believe that the SDLP has represented love over hate, good over evil and the New Testament over the Old. In 1990, on hearing of Cardinal O’Fiaich’s death and his coincidental age, I drew the conclusion that this is a conflict that has a very special purpose, and this purpose is to find a new way of resolving human problems. Nonetheless, the search for peace begins and ends with love, for love is the answer.
John O’Connell Autumn 2002
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